sex

The uproar in the blogosphere pales only in comparison to the uproar in our email inbox about My New Pink Button.

Penny R., Eden H., Alicia T., Shannon H., Nils G., Shiquanda S., Mickey C., and Bob C. have all sent in links to a new product designed to bring back the “fresh” to your lady parts. For 30 bucks you can get 3 days of pretty-in-pink. That’s right, genital dye to pinkify your private parts. In case you weren’t worried about this particular repulsivity, now you know. (It apparently works on men as well as women, and nipples too).

As they say at Jezebel: “Anti-aging mania and marketing: Not just for your face anymore!”

Shiquanda and Mickey brought our attention to this particular Q&A in the FAQ section:

Q. “Help! I’ve noticed I am turning a more brown color down there on my inside lips, is this normal”?

A. Yes, it’s perfectly normal and there are many factors that can contribute to this.  Ethnicity is a big factor, also age, hormone change, surgeries, childbirth, sickness, health, diet and medications can all contribute to a change from “Pink” to “Brown” in a woman’s genital area.

So this is kind of fascinating: browner coloring is “normal,” but you should change it anyway.  The message is that normal is not ideal.  We are normal (or at least white people are), and we still need fixing.

The FAQ makes plain the two ways in which marketing tries to convince us to change our bodies: both by telling us that our bodies are abnormal and by telling us that they are normal.  Normal bodies are icky, we’re told, your body should appear, as much as possible, as if it is not a body at all.  I mean, isn’t that part of what shaving our legs, chests, and genitals (both male and female) are about?

I think the ubiquitousness of breast implants in the media also sends the message that beautiful breasts have the look of breast implants (in terms of shape, size, and the position of the nipple).  I recently saw mannequins in a store window who were built to look as if they had breast implants.  Do you get how crazy that is?  If a mannequin is supposed to represent the ideal body, then the ideal body isn’t one with naturally large breasts, it’s one with fake breasts!  Nuts.  This world is nuts. (Kristi reminds me that this is insensitive to those with mental illness… and she’s right.)   Weird!  This world is weird!

(I looked this up on Snopes, but no word yet as to whether it’s a hoax. I have no idea whether this product is for real or whether it’s a big-enough-seller to get my panties in a bunch over.  Though it appears that you can order it, but it is of questionable efficacy.  Scam-status and efficacy aside, I think it still reveals something interesting about how we are told that our bodies aren’t good enough.)

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

This is the lead to an article in the Daily Mail, sent in by Chris W., about the small victories accomplished in 2009 by one “fifty-something” Linda Kelsey.  In addition to letting a man see her naked, she lists putting together home-assembly furniture and singing happy birthday in tune:

But back to the stripping.  The message she is trying to send is that she feels happy that she’s become more comfortable with her body.  She writes:

My fifty-something body, I believed, just wasn’t up to naked scrutiny. And if I couldn’t take my clothes off, that meant sex was also off the agenda.

But then she met someone she liked and yadda yadda yadda.

This is all fine and good, but the image they used to illustrate this particular victory is this:

So the image they used to illustrate her comfort with her body and the fact that “sex is about how we connect, not what we look like” suggests just the opposite.  The picture includes two mostly naked models (who are models because they have ideal bodies already); there’s no bodily connection at all and the man’s pose doesn’t suggest emotional connection either.

So women are being told how liberating it is to take their clothes off for men (how convenient for the dudes) and that they should feel comfortable with their bodies, like those young, thin, white, properly-gendered, able-bodied models do.

Now, if good ol’ “fifty-something” Linda Kelsey had posed displaying her newfound body comfort, like she does with her cardboard boxes, it would have sent the message she intended.  Instead, it makes us feel bad for feeling icky about our bodies AND reminds us that they are (probably) icky indeed.

P.S.: I just have to say, do you see that picture of her?!  She looks fine!  What fifty-something woman wouldn’t be pleased with that body?!  What woman of any age shouldn’t be pleased with that body? What kind of message does it send when she trashes herbody.  She must think most of the population is hideous.  We all need to stop trashing our bodies in front of one another, there’s just-about-always someone who ends up feeling worse because they compare their own body to the self-trasher and feel like they don’t measure up even to the body being disparaged.  Enough.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

James H. (of Town Creek Poetry) sent in this vintage Avis ad:

So the company marketed its cars to implicitly heterosexual male customers with the possibility of flirting, and even sexual access, to its attractive female employees (that is, “girls”). I have no idea if female employees were expected to actually wink at people.

Also see our post on Singapore Girls.

Gwen Sharp is an associate professor of sociology at Nevada State College. You can follow her on Twitter at @gwensharpnv.

Marie D. E. sent in this video, titled “Karen 26,” in which a woman claims to be looking for the father of the child she conceived after a one-night stand with a tourist (found at Adland):

The video, it turns out, was actually produced as part of a campaign by Visit Denmark, a Danish tourism agency. The idea is, apparently, to market Denmark to male tourists with the implication that it’s easy to have anonymous, unprotected sex with attractive local women who just want to introduce you to Danish customs. I don’t know that the possibility of unplanned pregnancy would be the best tourism draw, but she does assure us that she’s not a slut and she’s not wanting anything from the father, so perhaps that will reassure potential tourists that not only can they have unprotected sex with local women, there are no real consequences to doing so.

So the perception in many parts of the world of Scandinavian women as sexually liberated and promiscuous is used by a state-funded agency to promote tourism by turning female sexuality into another local attraction…with the added benefit of being free, unlike in nations known for sex tourism.

Also see our posts on promoting European tourism with infidelity, sex tourism in Thailand, and female sex tourists in the Caribbean.

When I was 15, for some bizarre reason, I saw War of the Roses (trailer).  The movie stars Kathleen Turner and Michael Douglas, who play a married couple in the midst of a divorce and basically spend the entire movie trying very, very hard to hurt each other physically and emotionally.  It’s a violent, violent comedy.

I remember really liking it and telling my Dad who, with his usual gentle wisdom, said something to the effect of “it’s never funny when two people who are supposed to love each other try to hurt each other.”  I was chagrined.

I was reminded of this moment when I watched the trailer for Bounty Hunter, sent in by Ryan G.  In the movie, Jennifer Aniston plays a woman who fails to show up in court and is then, essentially, violently kidnapped by her bounty hunter ex. The trailer:

Now, 20 years later, I’m with my Dad.

(Trigger warning for all the links below.)

What it is about U.S. society that makes sexually-charged violent hate so funny? Are we, as the bemoaners claim, anesthetized to violence? Is it an internalized sense that men and women are at war? Is it the idea that (heterosexual) relationships are, ultimately, a zero sume game? Is it a conflation of sex and power, and a constant affirmation that good sex (and relationships) include violence, that makes a movie such as this so titillating? Is it a true hate for the other, supposedly opposite sex? In other words, why doesn’t this trailer, for most, inspire disgust instead of anticipation?

Also related: violent divorce cakes.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

Elizabeth T., my awesome former student, asked us to write about Taylor Lautner’s Rolling Stone cover.

Of course, everyone’s been talking about  It’s either “oh he’s so hot!” or “he’s just seventeen! child pornography!”  But what I think is hilarious is the fact that they had to have him posing with a football.

You see, in this photograph, Lautner is a sex object.  And, as I’ve written before, a “sexual object is to be presented as passive, consumable, inert (remember, only one person gets “fucked”).”  And who does the fucking?  Men.  Real men.  And who gets fucked?  Women and womanly men (you might know them as “fags”).

So Lautner, by virtue of being objectified, threatens to also be seen as gay:

Apparently they’d rather break one of the golden rules of photography (don’t have anything coming out of the subject’s head), than allow Lautner’s sexual objectification call his sexuality into question.

Yes, yes we get it.  Lautner is a guy’s guy.  I mean, wait a second, he’s a girl’s guy.  Wait!  I mean he likes dudes!   No, not that way!  In a bros before hos way.  He likes dudes best, unless it’s for sex, then he likes girls!  He likes girls!  Even though he’s all sexy and wet and objectified, he’s not a fag okay!  We swear!  Look!  THERE’S A FOOTBAAAAAALLLLLLL!

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

Gwen M. and David B. sent us a link to a story on the Globe and Mail website about a video game that has a gay scene in it and the reaction in the gaming community:

The game is Dragon Age: Origins, which, according to the website, is “an epic tale of violence, lust, and betrayal.”

From the Globe and Mail article:

Earlier this year, to promote Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II , one of the biggest games of the year, the game’s developer, Infinity Ward, released a video online asking players to Fight Against Grenade Spam. The company eventually pulled the ad following complaints about the acronym.
…
Last year, Microsoft was accused of homophobia after banning gay-related gamertags – the names created by Xbox users to identify themselves online – such as theGAYERgamer and RichardGaywood.

As the article points out, it’s not that gay or bisexual characters/scenes haven’t appeared in video games before, but they’ve often been portrayed in very stereotypical or negative ways. And while some gamers have reacted positively, many have basically responded with “ew, gross!”

As Gwen said, this effort to normalize gay relationships in a popular video game, and the reactions to it, are “both encouraging — and saddening.”

Gwen Sharp is an associate professor of sociology at Nevada State College. You can follow her on Twitter at @gwensharpnv.

I recently posted about the de-gaying of the movie A Single Man in promotional posters and trailers for different audiences. James H. (of Town Creek Poetry) sent us an example of how the cover of the book Spice & Wolf was changed for the U.S. market (the original is the Japanese version; image found at siliconera):

So we move from a fully-clothed manga character to a cover with a photo of a naked woman with her head cut out of the image, removing all subjectivity. The publisher says they did so in order to try to draw in a wider audience than people who are already interested in manga, and apparently they decided that a naked woman is the way to draw the interest of U.S. readers.

I wish I could say they’re totally wrong and it would never work. But clearly Evony also thought it would be effective. I wish I knew how their sales have changed as their advertising became more boob-centric.